[Vision2020] Former FLDS Member: "I was 17 and he was 50"

[Tom Hansen]

"She grew up believing she had to 'live polygamy.' Now she lives among 
polygamists, offering refuge to those who want out."

"Mary Mackert, who left a polygamist marriage after 15 years, talks about 
being careful about talking about her family while growing up."

http://tinyurl.com/GrowingUpPolygamist
 
Courtesy of today's (February 22, 2009) Spokesman Review.

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'I was 17 and he was 50'
By Bill Morlin, Spokesman Review

Mary Mackert, of Boundary County, grew up in a polygamist family and was 
married at age 17, the sixth of her husband's seven wives. She left the 
sect in 1984.

http://tinyurl.com/MaryMackert
 
When she was just 17, Mary Mackert was forced to marry a man who was 50.

She'd been taught there was nothing else she could do.

So the teenager dropped out of high school and became the sixth of Wilford 
Alvin Draper's seven wives – carrying out the polygamous doctrine of the 
Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

At the time of her arranged marriage in Utah in 1969, Mackert was younger 
than some of her husband's children. By the time she was 30, she had given 
birth to five of Draper's 35 children.

She left the polygamous sect in 1984 after she was threatened with 
a "blood atonement" – having her throat slit – for being a disobedient 
wife.

But instead of completely distancing herself from the estimated 10,000 
members of the FLDS, the 57-year-old woman is now living in their midst in 
North Idaho.

Mackert leads a quiet, one-woman, nonprofit crusade – hoping to coax FLDS 
followers away from their polygamist religious beliefs. Not a day goes by, 
she says, that she doesn't think of her former religion, which preaches a 
man must live with multiple wives for any of them to get to heaven. 

She raises goats – guarded by her two Great Pyrenees dogs – on a modest 20-
acre ranch just north of Bonners Ferry, not far from the U.S.-Canadian 
border. Just across that border, an estimated 1,000 FLDS followers live in 
a community called Bountiful.
 
The group's Canadian leaders, Winston Blackmore and James Oler, face 
felony charges accusing them of violating that country's polygamy laws by 
having conjugal relations with multiple women. The accused leaders aren't 
talking, while their attorneys say the case will be a challenge of 
Canada's religious freedoms.

Already, there are indicators that the case is jarring the 60-year-old 
FLDS legacy in the southeastern corner of British Columbia and the more-
recent migration of followers to adjoining Boundary County, Idaho.

The group's North Idaho leader, general contractor Shem Johnson, of 
Bonners Ferry, has declined interview requests.

Mackert, now a born-again Christian, hopes the polygamy case in Canada 
rips open the secrecy shrouding the group, in which teenage girls just 
beyond puberty are forced to marry and have sex with men old enough to be 
their grandfathers.

She lived that life.

"I've just got such a heavy burden for these people who think they have to 
live polygamy to get to heaven," she said on a recent snowy day.

Growing up in polygamy

Mackert didn't have a choice about growing up in a polygamous family. She 
was born into one.

Her mother, Myra Kunz, and Kunz's sister, Donna, were two of 
three "celestial wives" given to Clyde Mackert.

Mary Mackert was born in February 1952 in Short Creek, the landmark 
polygamous community on the Arizona-Utah border that became the stronghold 
of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. 

The modern-day Mormon church denounces polygamy and FLDS followers, who 
call themselves "fundamentalist Mormons."

After a time in Short Creek in the 1950s, Mackert's father moved one of 
his wives and their children to Moab, Utah, and Myra and her sister to 
Grand Junction, Colo., where their children attended public school. Her 
father split his time among his three families.

In public school, Mackert said, she "had to lie" to teachers and other 
students, saying that Donna, her aunt, was her mother and that Donna's 
sons were her brothers.

"The neighbors weren't to know that my mother worked outside the home and 
Donna was the stay-at-home 'mom,' " she recalled.

As a child, she found the adult relationships in the FLDS community 
confusing.

"You were scared to talk to anybody for fear you'd say the wrong thing," 
she said. "I kind of withdrew into my shell. The worry was that if I said 
the wrong thing, then Daddy would go to jail."

By the fifth grade, Mackert and her two mothers and their children had 
moved to Salt Lake City, while Clyde Mackert's third wife remained in 
Moab. Her father would show up about one weekend a month to spend time 
with his wives Myra and Donna. "We were lucky if we even saw him – the 
absentee father," Mackert said.

By high school, her large family had moved to Kearns, Utah, not far from 
Salt Lake City, where they and other FLDS followers held church meetings.

"We lived secretly," she said. "We weren't openly polygamists to our 
neighbors and stuff. We had a rehearsed story to explain why our dad 
wasn't home all the time, where he was and what he did for a living."

One of seven wives

The FLDS church had a "law of placing" – a doctrine that prescribed how 
and when a teenage girl would become a plural wife. Her father got those 
directions from Leroy Johnson, who at the time was the church's "prophet" –
 said to be a direct link to God.

"When I submitted to the prophet, he placed me with Bill Draper," Mackert 
said. "I went and submitted to this arranged marriage.

"I was 17 and he was 50.

"I had his first child when I was 20 and four more by the time I was 30," 
Mackert said.

Draper had 30 other children and six other wives, mostly living under the 
same roof or in an adjoining residence. She called the other women "sister 
wives," who were supposed to be her friends and support system. But it 
didn't always work that way.

"Every day of my life was a competition for his resources," she 
said. "There was a lot of back-stabbing and scratching and clawing – 
emotionally and verbally, not physically. 

"There was a lot of competition for his time, his affection and his money."

Their house in downtown Salt Lake was remodeled with bedrooms in the attic 
and basement, "and we had bathrooms all over the place."

All the children were instructed to call their biological father Uncle 
Bill "so they wouldn't slip in public and call him 'Dad,' " she said. Her 
husband didn't want outsiders to know he had multiple wives and almost 
three dozen children.

"I understood it because I grew up with it," she said. "I thought it was 
normal for everybody to have more than one mom. It wasn't strange to me at 
all.

"I thought it odd that those strange kids out in the world only had one 
mom."

When she turned 30, Mackert learned her mother was leaving her husband 
because he had sexually abused one of their daughters – Mary's younger 
sister.

Her father was "brought before the priesthood brethren council," and the 
church elders ordered him to tell his wives, but he didn't do that, 
Mackert said.

Neither the church leaders nor the victim reported the molestation to 
police in Utah.

"It would give polygamy a bad name," she said. "These are supposed to be 
religious people who don't do things like that, so they kept it a secret."

The ongoing sexual abuse also was kept secret from her mother until her 
daughter – the victim – told her about it. The outcome, Mackert said, is 
her sister was banished from the family for making the allegations about 
her father.

Mackert, meanwhile, remained in her own polygamous marriage, content to be 
the sixth of seven wives.

Her husband followed a general plan for dividing his time.

"He rotated on nights where he slept," Mackert said, explaining that 
Friday night "was my night. The other nights I could count on him not 
being there."

'Blood atonement' for disobedience

By 1984, Mackert said, she'd had enough.

"I went to him and told him that I wanted a home of my own, that I didn't 
want to live with the rest of the family anymore." 

When her husband rejected the idea, citing religious grounds, Mackert 
responded: "You don't understand. I'm not talking about a 'want.' This is 
what I need to survive."

After he again refused, Mackert said she walked out the door "to go get a 
home of my own for me and my children."

But her husband followed and abducted her, she said. "He locked me in my 
room for a day and threatened a blood atonement" after falsely accusing 
her of infidelity.

Blood atonement centers on the fundamentalist Mormon belief that "some 
sins are so great that even the blood of Jesus Christ cannot cover your 
sin debt," she said. "The only way to be redeemed is to submit to your own 
demise. … It's considered a loving act."

Such sinners, according to FLDS doctrine, are supposed to willingly submit 
to blood-atonement carried out by their "priestly head" – their father, 
husband or brother.

"They slit your throat from ear-to-ear and disembowel you," Mackert 
said, "and that's the only way you're redeemed." Because she wouldn't 
admit to infidelity and submit to blood atonement, her husband believed 
the act would be futile, so he turned to FLDS prophet Rulon Jeffs for 
guidance.

At the meeting with Jeffs in Sandy, Utah, Mackert said she only got 
partway through her answer before her husband interrupted and finished 
answering. "I sat there and thought, 'Women have no voice here. He doesn't 
want to hear what I have to say.' "

After the meeting, Mackert got in her husband's car for the return trip to 
Salt Lake. "I started shaking so bad I couldn't hold anything in my hands. 
I was just trembling."

"I said, 'You let me out of this car or I'm going to jump,' " she 
recalled. "I didn't want to be called 'Sister Draper' anymore."

He stopped the car and she got out with only a $20 bill she'd hidden in 
her shoe.

"It was Sept. 2, 1984," she said. "That was the day I left."

Life after polygamy

With a case of documented depression, Mackert spent the winter with a 
friend. She found a Salt Lake City attorney who agreed to represent her 
without charge in a 1985 court fight to gain custody of her five boys. She 
eventually won that fight. 

Mackert and the children's father were never legally married with a state-
issued marriage license, but the court recognized them as the biological 
parents. Her ex-husband died a few years later. Alone with her children 
for the first time, Mackert went to school, got her high school 
equivalency degree, landed a secretarial job and enrolled at Salt Lake 
Community College. With help from food stamps and a displaced-homemaker 
program, she went on to get a business management degree from the 
University of Utah in 1991.

There weren't a lot of job openings for a 40-year-old single mother with a 
college degree but no experience, she said. So she worked as a secretary 
in Salt Lake before being hired by a company that installed phone systems. 

Her search for new religious roots, meanwhile, led her to the Baptist 
church.

She raised her five boys until they moved out on their own. Her oldest 
remains in the FLDS ranks. "I made him a soldier in the army, and I regret 
it to this day," she said.

In her spare time, Mackert began writing "The Sixth of Seven Wives: Escape 
from Modern Day Polygamy," a self-published book that came out in 2000. 
She sold hundreds of copies.

The undertaking was not only therapeutic, she said, but it also led to 
invitations to speak to church groups throughout the West. In the summer 
of 2003, she was invited to speak to a Baptist congregation in Creston, 
B.C., where church leaders embarked on a plan to use education to counter 
the growing FLDS presence in that community.

"No one talks about these kids who grow up in these communities, like I 
did, and have no choice," she said.

On her way back to Utah, Mackert said, she got a telephone call warning 
her that there were men at a restaurant in Creston, driving vehicles with 
Utah plates, overheard making death threats toward her. 

"I kept praying and asking God to send someone" to offer a ministry 
countering the views of the FLDS, she said. "At that point, my children 
were raised, and I felt God said to me, 'What about you?' " 

Mackert said she wasn't deterred by the threats and loved the beauty of 
rural Boundary County. She had begun caring for her single, elderly mother 
before the two decided to move from Utah to North Idaho in September 2004, 
knowing they'd be in the middle of another FLDS community.

Mackert formed a nonprofit ministry and sought modest financial support 
from individual churches. "I went out to raise financial support because I 
was without a job, and I got churches to back me. They donate money every 
month so I can be here, doing what I'm doing."

She befriends FLDS members living in Boundary County and nearby British 
Columbia, offering to be a refuge for anyone who wants to leave what she 
now considers a "religious cult."

She talked briefly about her relationship with one young plural wife who 
already has several children and appears to be struggling with the 
lifestyle and belief system she was raised in. The woman has done things 
to defy her husband and the church's strict dogma, but she remains locked 
in the FLDS community.

Mackert reached out to pet Gideon, one of her Great Pyrenees guard dogs, 
and said, "I just want to be here for her and any other women who think 
the time has come to break away."

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Tom "who believes that marriage is between two people" Hansen
Moscow, Idaho



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